Voices in Stone (11 page)

When Dad and Cally reached us – led by a couple of pretty grimy-looking protestor types wearing camo gear – Dad started shouting about how irresponsible and reckless I was, even though the whole thing had been Isis’s idea.

“Do you know what your mum would’ve done if we’d had to call the police?”

“And going off with a man you don’t know!” Cally shrieked at Isis. “He could be a murderer or
anything
!”

“Nice to meet you too,” said Merlin calmly.

Cally didn’t even hear, she just carried on shrieking. Then they frogmarched us back to the car park, changing gear between outraged silence and lectures the entire
way. Dad and Cally didn’t even do any lovey-dovey stuff, which shows how badly they took it, and as soon as we were in Dad’s camper, he started up again. As he drove he kept going on about how disappointed he was in my behaviour, you know?

But I only wanted to think about what had happened. Why had Isis wanted so desperately to go to the standing stone, so much so that she went off with someone we’d just met? And what did I see up there? Ghosts, or something else? I wanted to talk to Isis, find out what she had seen. But of course I couldn’t.

Eventually Dad wore himself out from telling me off, and just drove in silence, his jaw clenching and unclenching. When we got back into Wycombe, he didn’t head to his house, or to Mum’s.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“I’m picking Stu up,” he said, like that was somehow my fault.

“More UFO stuff?” I hoped that maybe I could distract him by getting him onto his favourite topic. It didn’t work though.

“He’s coming over for your benefit, not that you deserve
it. He’s been investigating UFO sightings and other activity at the quarry, trying to dig up any correlations with what happened to your class.”

“That’s what we’re doing after this?” I mean, my dad’s the only person who thinks good parenting is to sit huddled around a laptop for hours, Stu puffing away on his cigarettes and both of them getting all overexcited about aliens and conspiracies.

“You’re
not doing anything!” snapped Dad. “I’ve got a mind to take you straight back to your mum’s!”

I knew he wouldn’t though, because then Mum would ask why we were back early, and he’d have to tell her what had happened. He wouldn’t want her knowing I’d escaped on his watch.

“Stu’s car is at the garage,” said Dad, after a minute or two, “so I told him we’d swing by and pick him up on the way home. You’d better be on your best behaviour.”

I nodded. “Sorry, Dad,” I said for the fortieth time. And I was. Sorry, and frightened, and wondering if I was going mad.

We headed west, through the bits of town where all the houses are split into flats and the gardens are just
bin-holders. I expected Stu to live somewhere like that, but Dad took a turning into a cul-de-sac lined with bungalows, which was all frilly curtains and neat gardens.

“Stu lives here?”

Dad nodded.

“Does he live with his mum?”

I mean, Stu was at least fifty, but he definitely seemed the type.

Dad shook his head. “He lives with his wife.”

“He’s
married
?”

Dad pulled the van to the side of the road. “Getting on for thirty years. They’ve got a couple of grown-up kids, I think.”

I tried to imagine having Stu for a dad, but I couldn’t.

Someone stepped out of a gap between two garden hedges. He had an anorak hood pulled around his face, the way celebs do to try to avoid getting snapped by the paparazzi, and he was carrying a massive holdall. He made a run for the camper, nearly falling over because he was in such a hurry. It was Stu, of course. Anyone else would just wait inside their house, but not him.

Stu pulled open my door. “Let me in quick,” he said. “I can’t be in plain sight long.”

Dad nodded at me and I sighed, climbing over the passenger seat and into the back.

“Don’t want them making the connection between you and me,” Stu said to Dad. As if anyone would care!

I sat down on the floor in the back of the camper, put my back to a cupboard, and braced my feet against the side of the van. There aren’t seats in the back; Dad took them out so he could fit more UFO hunting gear in. It’s not too uncomfortable, unless Dad goes over a lot of bumps.

“Anyone follow you?” Stu asked Dad.

Dad shook his head. “I’m always careful.” I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not, they take it all so seriously.

Dad set off, and I didn’t say anything for a bit; I was still getting over the idea of Stu being married. Instead I stared at the sky through the windscreen. The clouds were all piled high and golden with shadows, like when you see old-fashioned pictures of God.

“Full blasting hasn’t started,” Dad said to Stu. They were chatting about the quarry, of course. “One of the
protestors told me they’ve been holding things up for weeks now.”

Stu snorted. “I doubt it’s anything to do with the protestors. Probably money or the weather. I went to that protest camp last week, to ask if anyone had seen any UFOs around there, and they didn’t even know what I was talking about!”

I spoke up from down on the floor. “Why were you asking them about UFOs?”

Stu turned around in his seat. “There’s a lot of activity in this whole area. Unexplained lights, people losing time, mysterious beings. And all the witchcraft traditions associated with the standing stone.”

I felt a bit sick when he said that. By then I was starting to think the shapes I’d seen could’ve been anything, even witches.

“And then this
quarry
, right in the middle of it,” said Stu. He turned back to Dad. “I bet a million pounds we’ll find out the military is involved in that.” He sounded really pleased with the idea.

“There could be some undercover police hiding among the protestors…” said Dad.

“Not only the police. MI5 at least. This is just the kind of thing they’ll be watching.”

“Why would MI5 care about a quarry?” I asked.

Stu still had his hood up, straggles of grey hair poking out of the sides. He gave me this look he has: poor-stupid-you-for-not-understanding, lucky-I’m-here-to-sort-you-out.

“This is a rare earth quarry, Gray,” he said.

“I know,” I answered. He’d probably forgotten I was one of the people who’d been inside the quarry, now he was Mr Expert.

“So then, where are the main deposits of rare earths?” he asked me.

I thought back to our geography lessons. “China? The coast of Japan?”

“Exactly. Yet right here in our county is one of the richest and rarest deposits in the world, apparently. Don’t you think that’s odd?”

“No. It has to be somewhere.”

Stu leaned over his seat at me. “I know geologists who say that a rare earth deposit shouldn’t even
be
here.”

I wondered what kind of geologists Stu would know.
Ones who think volcanoes are really a secret plot by an underground lizard civilisation, probably.

“Combine that with it being a hotspot for UFO sightings…” said Stu, meaningfully.

“So… what? It’s an alien base?”

Stu laughed, shaking his head. “Of course not! Everyone knows those are in the Welsh mountains. But it doesn’t mean aliens aren’t mixed up in this. Think what rare earth metals are used for – tablets and smartphones and so on. Haven’t you ever wondered how a technology could be so addictive that people queue all night to buy it, and once they’ve got it they can’t do anything else? All swiping away on their touchscreens. What if it’s not just chance?” He turned to Dad. “You still don’t let him have a mobile phone?”

“I don’t,” said Dad.

“Which isn’t fair,” I said, “because everyone else has one! They said on TV that in three years from now, all kids over ten will have a smartphone. All of them except me.”

Stu frowned at me from inside his anorak hood. “You think it’s just playing games and tweeting your friends? What are smartphones
really
doing?”

I shrugged.

“Tracking you! Every call, every text, everywhere you go, everything you say and do. It’s all recorded and sent off, so they know exactly what you’re up to, every minute of every day.”

“Why would anyone do that?” I said.

“Control!” hissed Stu, leaning right over the seat. “They talk about monitoring terrorists, when really they mean all of us. And you go along with it because they make it fun. Clever, aren’t they?”

Stu’s always going on about ‘they’. It’s why he keeps his hood up, so ‘they’ can’t take his photo. Sometimes ‘they’ are the government, sometimes ‘they’ are a secret organisation, sometimes ‘they’ are aliens. But I bet whoever ‘they’ are, ‘they’ aren’t even interested in Stu.

“Why would they want to control all of us?” I asked.

“There’s a hundred people in the world,” hissed Stu, “who between them have as much wealth as the three billion people on the bottom half of the world’s heap. Did you know that?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “With that kind of money being piled up, of course they need something to keep people nice and distracted! Stop them
asking if it’s fair. That’s where your smartphones and funny cat websites and phone games come in. You think they aren’t loaded with tricks? You’re getting mind-warped, and you don’t even know it.”

“That’s not even possible,” I said. “You can’t mind-control people without them even knowing…”

“What about hypnotism?” Stu said. “That’s mind control.”

Dad shook his head. “Hypnotism’s no good on a large scale, because anyone who’s got a bit of willpower can break out of the control once they know it’s happening. Like me, I could never be hypnotised, because of my strong mind.”

Me and Stu shared a look.

“Games and cat websites are just for fun,” I said.

“Are they?” asked Stu.

“What else are they for?”

He shook his head slowly, like I was being thick.

“Rates of youth crime are going down, did you know that? Not just in this country, but all over the world. And why? Because you’re all being brainwashed, all getting tracked. You’re all soft and docile, the way they want you, so you won’t fight back when it starts…”

“That’s enough, Stu,” said Dad.

Stu looked at Dad, so all I could see was the blue of his anorak with his nose poking out.

“Don’t you want your own son to know the truth?” he asked, like he couldn’t believe it.

“Let him be,” said Dad.

“Know what?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

It had to be another of his conspiracies. The freaks in the Network are always cooking them up. Like when Stu told me the scandal about horsemeat in food was really a cover-up for aliens. He said the aliens were kidnapping the horses, doing weird experiments on them, then selling the dead ones to supermarkets in order to infect us with alien DNA. He said the horse DNA was really just a tracer, so the aliens could work out who’d been alien-infected.

I mean, if Stu believed the moon was made of cheese, he’d claim that every astronomer in the world was secretly controlling Stilton supplies.

Now Dad shook his head at Stu. “Gray’s heard enough, okay?”

Stu didn’t move for about ten seconds, then he quickly scrunched round to face me, before Dad could stop him.

“Think about it,” he whispered. “Seven billion humans in the world, and half the wealth owned by just a hundred of them. How can such a tiny group of people keep hold of all that money? With the Organisation, which they set up to…”

“Stu!” snapped Dad.

“What’s the Organisation?” I asked.

“You’ve said yourself the lengths they’ll go to,” Dad growled at Stu. “I don’t want Gray involved!”

“You think he isn’t involved already? You think you aren’t on their radar? He needs to
know
.”

“Know what?” I asked. “What are you going on about?”

Neither of them said anything for a minute, just Stu glaring at Dad, and Dad glaring at the road.

“All right,” snapped Dad. “But no details, okay?”

Stu turned back to me, and he looked happier than I’ve ever seen him. It must be like getting a present for him, being able to fill someone in on one of his conspiracies.

“You know about Roswell, yeah?”

I nodded. It’s this place in the United States where a UFO supposedly crashed in the 1950s, and the American military found bodies of alien pilots.

“Well that’s total rubbish,” said Stu. “Just a weather balloon and Cold War hysteria. I mean, aliens don’t go crashing flying saucers; they don’t even use flying saucers.”

Dad nodded. “Think about what we saw this summer, the footage we got.”

I wanted to tell him that those balls of light weren’t UFOs either; they were ghosts. But I didn’t; it would’ve taken way too much explaining, even if they’d believed me.

“Those of us who’ve delved deeper,” continued Stu, “we know that Roswell is just a red herring. A distraction so people won’t even go searching for the real truth.”

I didn’t ask what the real truth was, he was going to tell me anyway.

“Aliens contacted this planet decades ago,” said Stu darkly. “They want to help us; they’ve got technology we can hardly even imagine. But those people, the ones who own everything, they don’t want us having free energy, an end to disease and poverty, the knowledge of advanced civilisations. If everyone had everything they needed, how would the rich be able to control things? How would they make more money? So they set up the Organisation,
to stop us finding out about the aliens and all they could give us, and to stop the aliens from contacting us. It’s why they do their mind-wiping on anyone who gets close to the truth. It’s why I have to be so careful. The trouble is, once you let something like that loose, a secret group with more money behind them than any government, then the genie’s out of the bottle, if you get my meaning, and now they’ve…”

“That’s enough,” said Dad, cutting him off. “I don’t want him knowing anything from the top-secret part of the Database.”

I stared at the back of Dad’s head, wondering how much of all this he believed. Stu’s eyes bulged, waiting for my reaction.

I sighed. “So the quarry is to do with aliens, is that what you’re saying?”